On 6/18/24 21:09, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
Today I came across an obituary of Lynn Conway, computer pioneer in the field of VLSI(along with Carver Mead) and also in one called dynamic instruction scheduling(used in supercomputing world). More to the point Conway was transgender and suffered for this, an almost forgotten pioneer in the microcomputing and supercomputing fields. Also, as a researcher at IBM and Xerox Parc where she contributed to the first years of microcomputing, the GUI and Ethernet protocol development. Eventually the IEEE recognized her contributions as did IBM - better late than never!
WOW, sad news! Yes, Larry/Lynn Conway was right in the middle of MAJOR developments in computers and ICs. I think as Larry, he wrote a cycle-by-cycle simulator that was used to test performance of computer designs in the 360 series and later machines. The original ran on the 7094 (that should date this.) Later, that simulator was used to predict the performance of what became the 360/85, which was really the prototype of the 370/165. The /85 was the first IBM machine to use a cache (called a storage buffer by IBM). The /85 was the first production machine from IBM to use monolithic integrated circuits (MST4) and water cooling The simulator was also used to evaluate the performance of the never-built FS and ACS projects.
When I heard about Lynn and Carver's book and work in logic synthesis, I thought they were nuts. Well, I was looking about a year ahead, and they were looking TWENTY years into the future!
Jon
